Human Rights as agreed in the United Nations and the CDHRI

I've been wanting to post this for quite some time, but I had work obligations to attend. Anyhow....

This post will focus on human rights, an issue that is yet to be understood fully by all Malaysians. With the issues that have been ongoing, I think it's more important that everyone establish a clear understanding of this necessity (yes, it is a necessity because the lack of it would only promote injustice).

According to United Nations, human rights is defined as "Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status. We are all equally entitled to our human rights without discrimination. These rights are all interrelated, interdependent and indivisible" (Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights). Simply said, any human that is born into this world have a series of rights that they inherit for their existence. For many years, no correction, for many millenniums the human rights issue has been debated and handled as such that hierarchy system was practiced in history (e.g. caste system in India, class system in the Middle Ages).

With the creation of United Nations, one of the key documents ever made through the institution is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDoHR). You have two choices: either read the full text from the official website (http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#a1); or, just watch the video below.

The UDoHR is one of the components that makes up the International Bill of Human Rights; while the other components include: i) the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; and ii) the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It is a fact that Malaysia is just among the few nations that have not sign and ratify both treaties into the nation's legislation. One might assumed that as Malaysia is projecting toward "developed country" status, the government would accept the treaties into our everyday lives. However, this is not the case for the fact that Malaysia is predominantly an Islamic and Malay state, which seems to be in conflicting in accepting UDoHR which other Islamic nations share the same sentiment.

Among the criticisms set on UDoHR is that the Islamic World (particularly members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference), the UDoHR is biased toward the Judeo-Christian cultures and not to Islam (Universal Human Rights & "Human Rights in Islam" by David G. Littman). Thus, in 1990, the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI) was established, which can easily be viewed as the Islamic treaty on human rights in accordance to the Shari'ah law. Again, this only applies to the Islamic World and is more biased to Islam that there have been criticisms which states the CDHRI lacking respect towards human rights.

In my opinion, as Malaysia is a signatory to CDHRI and not to other treaties (i.e. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), the racial mix in conjunct with cultural and religious elements may not be well saturated within our borders. In effect, this eventually led to misunderstandings (e.g especially the previously-known "the right to use the word Allah" issue). No matter the differences that each human being have in this world, it's a real pity that we cannot achieve utopia where we all can sing, "Why Can't We Be Friends?"